Open Letter from Union of BC Indian Chiefs to Carolyn Bennet (Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada (CIRNA): “Recall the Collaborative Process survey and honour the UN ruling on the Indian Act’s discrimination against women”.
The CIRNA’s survey is fundamentally flawed and unrepresentative of the true collaboration that needs to take place between Indigenous Peoples and the Government of Canada. Designed by the government as a nominal and placatory symbol of “reconciliation” and “renewed relationships,” the survey is anything but collaborative. Now that the UN Committee has ruled that Canada must dismantle the discriminatory, sex-based hierarchy in the status registration provisions of the Indian Act, the survey is unnecessary and insulting to the Indigenous women who continue to have their right to equality breached.